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Ancient Or Digital: Our Social Selves Are The Same As Our Ancestors

I recently watched the sun rise over Angkor Wat. The ancient Khmer people of Cambodia built the temple as a vessel to transport their king to the heavens after death. The city of Angkor, a metropolitan marvel of close to a million people, surrounded the gigantic stone structure for nearly six centuries. Over time, the city swelled in size and the Khmer’s intricate waterway system fell apart along with the rest of its infrastructure. The city and its people vanished.

Technology has allowed us to build communities, as massive as ancient empires, that transcend a physical space. But in many ways, we’ve carried over social habits from the past that mirror the movements of our ancient ancestors. Some examples:

We marvel at the men and women who toil for hours to erect digital structures in Minecraft, just like the Egyptians did to deliver their pharaohs to the Gods.

We cheer on teams of people who can conquer the digital arena that is StarCraft, just like the citizens of Rome did for their celebrated gladiators.

We migrated our digital identities in droves to a land called Facebook when MySpace could offer us no more—just like those before us who wandered the deserts of Iraq, the valleys of India, or the lakes of Khmer when their social fabric was threatened.

I took this photo of Angkor Wat at around 5:45 am.

When your online community falls, what happens to the tribes and clusters of people who banded together? Where do they go? How do they rebuild culture in a society that dictates something different? Not everyone assimilates into what’s next. My friends and I on Myspace certainly didn’t.

The Last Tribe Of A Fallen Social Empire

The community that was Myspace is still alive. You’ll never find it because it’s hidden away in a private group on Facebook. Fifty-three men and women, including myself, have gathered there to continue what semblance of a community we had before being forced to build our society elsewhere.

My group came from a corner of Myspace that most people never ventured: the discussion forum community. It was a vibrant place of harsh opinions free from the user profile suburbia of personal Myspace pages. We shared music and hard to find digital formats of great albums, discussed popular culture, debated the merits of tacos, and spent untold hours forging friendships with people on all corners of the earth. We were strangers who became friends even though we’d never met.

Like all great civilizations, ours began its slow decline; and as the very code that held our forum together began to crumble, we tried our best to keep things intact. Inevitably, our end came. We abandoned each other and moved on. The younger members joined Facebook, and the older ones, restricted by the social network’s early age requirements, went off into the unknown depths of the web.

Then Mark Zuckerberg opened the floodgates and allowed anyone over twenty-five into Facebook. It turned out that the folks who had wandered off into the unknown depths of the web had kept in touch with each other after leaving Myspace–something us younger members didn’t do. And, with some memory jigging, they were able to cobble together a small, loyal faction of us into a group again. In some ways, the elders had breathed life into our tribe and we were reborn on Facebook.

After three years of wondering if my tribe was extinct, I had finally reconnected with the family that was only now fully forming into people beyond their online personas—another shift in our culture. Social networks today stress an emphasis on connecting with people we actually know, or have met in real life. Faces that once hid behind avatars were now Dave the mover who composed unique guitar rock about his daily life raising a family; Rob the artist and MC who could fire off life-like vector illustrations of us in a few hours; Ben the talented Welsh photographer; Amelia the book-loving Canuck; Helen the queen of all things pop; Norm the wise man from Arkansas; and Nate the elusive taco-loving expert on garage rock. We learned things about each other that we’d never known because our habits on Facebook showed each other more.

This migration came with sacrifices, and not everyone made it into our new hidden tribe. Some didn’t want to participate. Gone was our ability to define ourselves through a kaleidoscope of profile pages. Facebook, as Matt Webb would point out, had distilled our culture down into “a gridded Excel spreadsheet of relationship changes and status updates.” But there we were–the few of us who remained–picking back up where we had left off with pictures, videos, and music snobbery. Despite the drastic changes to our culture, we are still here being our weird selves.

I wonder if we’ll survive the next great migration. I wonder what our social selves will become when what we have now begins to crumble again.

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